


This Blind Faith

by cmwaisner



Series: Prose [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Happy Halloween!, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:40:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27339580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmwaisner/pseuds/cmwaisner
Summary: The hall is dark, and there’s something dripping.Maybe it’s the leaky taps, she thinks. Maybe it's the oil can. Maybe it’s the steady flow of blood down her fingers, slipping to the floor with a soft sound that seems to echo around the house.How had it come to this?
Series: Prose [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2100753
Kudos: 1





	This Blind Faith

The hallway is dark, a sea of black.

Not so different from her everyday world, but she cannot deny how comforting, how familiar this feels.

The carpet is soft, plush, beneath her feet. The pattern is ugly, an odd, curled vein of light running along darker edges. She marvels at the detail of it.

Someone’s hands made this. Someone tracked the path of the needle through heavy fabric. 

Could she do the same? 

Sewing had been a lost cause in her younger years. Too many pricked fingers, the blood dropping heavy to the floor with little  _ plinks  _ as she tried to pierce silk, lace, satin.

All for naught. But no longer.

She takes her time sizing up the hall, and she doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she finds it. There, innocent on the desk that’s sat in their foyer for many, many years: a vase, an ancient heirloom made by her ancestors' own fingers. It glints, the varnish glossy in a way she’s never appreciated before. There’s a fountain pen, graphite, and there, gleaming in the slivers of pale moonlight––a letter opener. 

Inelegant, harsh, but functional enough for her purpose, tonight.

She crouches, careful, as she slides it from its holder. Grips it tightly, her fingers firm, yet tender around its handle in a way she has never been in the daylight. Her hands have always been unsteady, unsure as she moved through her life.

They aren’t trembling now.

She creeps down the hallway, placing her feet, one in front of the other, up the wooden stairs. She sticks to the side, hand sliding, whisper-soft, along the wooden rail, her fingers following the grain of it. 

The first bedroom door is open. Better for air circulation, her mother says. Her father would’ve rolled his eyes. He found very little joy in his wife, these days. ‘Better to annoy me, no doubt,’ he’d say.

_ Better for later _ , she thinks.

She moves on to the second. The door is closed. It’ll make noise when she comes in, and there’s two people inside. She hadn’t known that there would be guests. Hadn’t wanted to think of them.

The third room: an open door, and the hinges have been freshly oiled. She’d made sure the can had been placed directly in the back corner of the shed, just as it had been hours before, when the gardener had gotten the shears. She had tracked the dust carefully on the shelf with her hand, to ensure its proper placement.

Perfect.

The door slides open like a sigh, and moonlight bathes the room.

She makes quick work of it. A pillow over that peaceful face, the one she has felt so many times, trying to engrave its image in her mind. The letter opener is driven in with a flick of her wrist, straight through the chest. 

“Sh, sh, you’re alright. You’re okay, easy,” she whispers. “Nothing can hurt you, now.”

It feels as if there are clouds in her head, cotton that sits heavy in the sides of her brain, blocking those rational thoughts that are desperate to peek through. Screaming at a deaf girl, who’s long since left her sane mind in that bedroom, just as dead as her family will be.

She feels high on it all.

She traces a ragged nail along the still-bright skin, flushed with panic despite the way it quickly cools. She can feel every pore beneath the grooves of her finger. Can feel the soap her sister used to wash the fine skin of her eyelids.

Her sister had always hated how puffy her eyes got in the morning, after a night of crying out for a savior that wasn’t there.

Blood rises, muddy and sluggish. She takes it on her fingertip, holding it close to her face as she examines it. A dark bead, the white moonlight glinting off of it like a gem. It’s lovely in a way things have never been to her.

_ Creak. _

The only benefit of her life: her hearing and touch have always been unnaturally perceptive. God’s only gift, to get her through this life and into the next.

She turns, and sees her aunt, wan and white as a ghost. 

She grins.

Four more to go. 

*

The mornings after her dreams are the hardest. 

She can feel the itch of it under her skin, wants to take the fabric of these silly gowns and rip them to pieces. Turn them into something ugly, just like her.

She won’t, though. She’ll settle for the quiet grinding of teeth, the harshness of nails, scratching along walls, along skin.

Louisa comes in, a bustle of movement. She can never seem to be quiet, or wake her up before she herself has risen already. Louisa makes sure she’s safe. Louisa is her eyes, when she is awake. When she is no longer living inside of her head.

But she’s always been trapped within her own mind’s eye, hasn’t she? Her own are clouded over, the windows to her soul fogged and cracked. Faulty.

Dead.

She reaches out blindly for the old woman, and a rough, wrinkled hand meets hers. Louisa’s hand is black, she knows, bound by the chains of being born into a world too proud for her, but she doesn’t really know what that means. How can color matter, when she can’t even imagine the concept? When she hasn’t the tools to determine a difference in skin she has not felt?

She’s dressed quickly. Louisa is swift in all her duties, though she lingers at the corners when working with her. Louisa likes her, she knows. Louisa likes that she can’t feel superior based on something as trivial as the shade she is.

The trip down to breakfast is as clumsy as ever––the wooden stairs are a hassle, always squeaking in the center, but Louisa guides her down them, one at a time. She is so, so careful––Louisa is gentle in a way that one can only be when they have experienced the harshness of a hand and wish to rectify the wrong done to them by being kind to others.

Louisa is the only good thing in her world.

As she sits at the table, her chair a ratty old thing, she can feel the sunlight on her cheek. Warm, bright––she imagines it to look like a hand. Soft, until one has overstayed their welcome and must be dealt those final, burning blows.

The tea is bitter; “healing,” they say, though it will never stop her blindness, she knows. She’s long accepted that she will be forever powerless in this way. 

Louisa lifts a fork to her mouth. “Open, ma’am.”

She does. The eggs are good; celery and spices and tomato. The sausage is even better––it has just the right amount of salt to make her forget everything. To transport her to a time when she might’ve closed her eyes to better savor its taste.

Louisa doesn’t need to feed her like this––they’ve long come to the agreement that she will do what she can, and Louisa will only ensure she doesn’t meet her end along the way. If she does, both of them will lose, and she doesn’t want that for Louisa in any measure.

But in the mornings, when there is any chance of the family seeing her brief exercises of independence…

No. She will not risk Louisa. Not in this life.

After she goes to the library. She is past her teenage years, now; too old to get married, too damaged for anyone to want to take as their own. It doesn’t matter; she likes her books. In her fairytale, only the prince goes blind.

She traces her fingers along the bumps of the page, feels the indents and edges–– _ ”’The cat got her, and will scratch out your eyes as well. You have lost Rapunzel. You will never see her again.’” _

The bumps are almost smoothed down from the years of her reading, but she always comes back. She doesn’t even need the book, now, to remember its words. The prince always goes blind, but even so, Rapunzel always returns his sight to hin.

She will never be so lucky, and she has no prince to take her away from her tower. No prince to stop things that have already happened.

Louisa’s out in the garden. Louisa’s probably talking to the gardener––and she suddenly remembers the oil can. Back right corner, always two inches from the edge of the shelf, oil still dripping from the end. Always on the edge of tipping onto the dirt floor of the garden shed.

It tempts her. She can almost see it––the blood, the bones, the  _ gore.  _ She can still feel the blood under her fingernails.

She can still feel it biting at her.

She turns back to her storybook. A fairytale for another day, maybe.

She can’t see the clock, but she can hear the chimes. She’d eaten lunch in the library and skipped dinner altogether. Louisa helps her to her room carefully, each step up the stairs a slow one. 

When she’s bathed and laid down to rest, she thinks. She hears the click as Louisa shuts the door, the whispered “goodnight” as she leaves her to a second layer of darkness. 

And she’s frozen with the fear of it.

She will sleep tonight, of that she has no doubt. Sleep has always snuck up on her, even in the most detrimental of times. 

But will she dream?

She doesn’t know what scares her more: that she may dream, or that she may dream and hope not to wake up.

She rolls over, burrowing further into the covers. She imagines beams of moonlight hitting the bed. She imagines blood soaked through the sheets.

She imagines, and she  _ yearns _ . 

And she thinks that that might be what scares her the most.

*

When she reemerges into fantasy, she is entering the hallway. Her aunt has a candelabra in her hand, poised at the ready. It glints, reflecting its surroundings in a warped, twisted way.

She grins. It tangles that, too.

Her aunt stumbles back, mouth opening to scream, but she is quicker. She darts forward, and shoves her head into the wall. A wet thunk, and her skull caves. Soft, dull insides slide down the wall as the body slips to the floor. Blood leaks, a dark puddle, a mirror. 

She doesn’t step away as it reaches her foot, as it soaks in between her toes. She watches as it leaves footprints on the floor; a guide to this dance she alone can hear the music to.

“Patricia?”

Her aunt’s name. 

She slips into the shadows. Her father is a light sleeper, always has been. Overbearing, overprotective, and heavy-handed when it comes to everything else in his life, but not in sleep. In sleep, he is the lightest of all.

“Pa––oh, god!”

She ducks into the moonlight, then. Her father’s eyes widen in horror, in a slow-building realization. So busy trying to shield his broken daughter from threat, he didn’t even realize she  _ was  _ one.

He’s larger than her, but he’s off balance, too. This is a nightmare he’d never once dreamed of.

But she? She has lived this fantasy millions of times. 

She scoops the vase from the table, and she shatters her ancestor’s artful creation into the head of their offspring. Her father stumbles back, and for once in her life, she feels something like satisfaction run through her veins. 

To make this great man crumble––that will bring her so close to euphoria she might die of it. And wouldn’t that be terribly ironic? There is no place in heaven for her. Any euphoria she finds will be on the earthly plane, and wherever she finds it will send her straight to the depths of burning fire.

But wouldn’t it be worth it? 

It certainly feels so, as she watches blood gush from her father’s eyes. He cries out, somewhere between a scream and a groan, and she charges forward, shoving him to the ground. His head lands next to his sister-in-law’s. 

She launches herself atop him, and her hands fly to his neck. Tight, and unrelenting.

He struggles, of course he does. But she has waited too long to feel his pulse dwindle beneath her fingers.

“You were so protective,” she hisses, her lips curling into a snarl. Her eyes must look deranged, her hair wild around her face. Some sort of demon, come to wreak revenge. Some sort of divine, reclaiming its right.

“But you didn’t protect  _ me _ ,” she snarls, and she pushes harder. He kicks up, but his legs have grown feeble through the years. His hand beats against her thigh once, twice, three times, and then his hand is on the floor. Lifeless. Gone.

Victory thrums through her, stomps out all thoughts of guilt. 

She has yet to truly be satisfied. There is only one man that will stop her thirst for blood.

But first…

The thud of the bathroom door. The click of a lock, the turn of a key.

Her mother had always been the type to run away from family, hadn’t she?

*

The next day is harder.

Her mother is a quiet woman, soft-spoken and demure. Weak. 

Her sister, though, is quiet in a different way. Quiet in the things that matter. In the pain she’s faced. But she has always been loud about the things she enjoys, if only to cover up the deathly silence of her unsaid terrors.

A terror they both share, it seems.

Her sister takes her hands in hers, and the contact is a shock to her system. Her sister’s hands are ice cold, icy as death. A shiver runs down her spine.

Had she not felt this skin, still cooling, just nights ago?

“Come with us,” her sister pleads, and she imagines her eyes are big, imploring. “Come! Mother said we could buy new silks, and that we might even find new bonnets. Oh, please, won’t you come?”

She’s about to protest when her sister leans in; she feels the heat of her against her cheek. Her tone has a teasing, conspiratorial edge. “You know how I detest Mother when she gets all huffy over ‘proper dress.’”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she replies, if only so that she doesn’t have to feel those ice-cold hands in hers anymore.

When she proposes the idea to her mother, she can sense how her whole demeanor sharpens.   
  
It’s not long before she’s standing outside of her father’s office. Her hands shake, just slightly. She knocks three times on the wood.

“Come in.”

She steps inside, and Louisa guides her to the chair in front of his large desk. He must seem rather intimidating, hulking behind the large expanse of wood she knows is there. So much bigger than those he would be staring down.

But she has never been afraid of her father. Not truly. He does not make her skin crawl in the way another man does.

“You cannot go to town; you know this.” His voice thunders in her ears. It almost makes her feel small. Almost.

“I do,” she says, “But I fear my sister likes to bend the rules.”

“Well, bending the rules is not far off from breaking them. And you will not break my rules, do you understand me?” he says, deep and harsh. She imagines he’s pointing a stern finger at her.

“Yes, Father,” she intones. It means nothing, the empty promise dripping from her lips without a second thought. He taught her obedience, and continues to beat it into her skull again and again. Habits are not easily broken, she knows.

She remembers how his neck fit in the palms of her hands.

“Your Aunt and Uncle will be visiting. They arrive late tonight.”

And she suddenly wants to feel that pulse die again. She feels a coldness settle in her bones, a chilling fear sink into her marrow. 

And all at once she feels beyond helpless. 

She feels that perhaps she will be the dead body in the hallway, rather than the family that deserves it so.

*

When she sleeps that night, she steps over her father’s body. 

His eyes are still wide with fear, bulging with surprise, with betrayal, with the lack of air. He’s cold. Still not as cold as he had been in life, but cooler than she could’ve ever hoped.

She hears her mother sobbing from behind the bathroom door. How her uncle hasn’t woken yet, she doesn’t know. If he dies in his sleep, she will join him. She will chase him into hell, and bring him back, if only to stab him clean through and send him right back.

“Mother,” she hums through the door.    
  
A great, shuddering gasp. 

She smiles. “Mother, come out. I’d like to see you.”

“Go!” her mother wails. She traces a finger along the door frame as she listens to her mother’s cry. Desperate, hoarse––but not enough. Never enough, for the things she ignored. For the scenes she chose to turn away from.

“You wretched girl, leave!”

And she suddenly feels an anger the likes of which she’s never felt before.

Because isn’t that what her mother’s been doing all her life? Leaving behind her daughters, who were desperately seeking someone who would look, who would  _ see  _ the things they were being put through? She may be blind, but never so much as her mother, who chose to look away when her crippled daughter was torn apart by a man she still calls brother.

The lock is easy to pick. It’s dark, so she can’t quite see, but when have the shadows ever bothered her? She makes quick work of the lock. As the door creaks open, she sees her mother, huddled in the corner under a thin shaft of moonlight. A lonesome spotlight on prey that doesn’t deserve to be spared.

Her mother trembles so hard it seems as if the ground shakes beneath her feet. 

She goes still. Watches, as her mother falls apart before her.

“Please don’t,” her mother begs. “Please, there was nothing I could do!”

Her hand is around her neck before she can think. She gets up close. She will look into the eyes of her mother when she does this. She will see the fear in her eyes, the pain she herself has felt. “You could’ve done anything!” she hisses.

She throws her mother into the bathtub. She’s feeble, and she hears a crack. Hears a tear, a whimpering shriek. It’s music. It’s heaven.

She takes her mother’s hair, pulls them eye level. Her mother whimpers, tears and snot a steady stream down her face. “Don’t do this!” she pleads, but she has never felt much sympathy with those who beg.

She has learned, in the most brutal of ways, that begging will get one nowhere.

“I said much the same thing,” she says, and her voice goes unbelievably quiet as her mind blanks. She will not think of it. She  _ won’t _ . “And I will show all the mercy this wretched family has shown me!”

She hears her nose break. Hears the splatter of blood as she drives her mother’s face into the edge of the bathtub. Porcelain cuts skin, muscle, bone. She’s soaked with blood, soaked with her mother’s sacrifice, and she’s never felt more high on anything in her life.

She drives her mother’s face repeatedly against the edge. It’s hardly even defined, now: just a mess of brain matter and skin. She can’t tell where her eyes were, but her teeth are clearly defined. Most are missing. Some are cracked. A few seem to have found their way into the top of her forehead.

It’s a mess. It’s a bloody, horrible,  _ savage  _ mess. 

She almost wishes she wouldn’t wake up.

But she will. 

Even so, she can hear the ticking of her uncle’s clock. His end is so near she can almost taste it.

She imagines it will be sweet.

*

She lays in bed far past the moment she wakes.

She doesn’t want to see them. Doesn’t want to see any of them, because she knows if she does, she’ll want to scream, want to hurt, want to  _ maim _ . She will tear and fight and kick and kill. She will kill them, if she sees them.

They’re all so  _ weak! _

But, as it always does, time goes on. And Louisa enters the room with fresh laundry, and she will be forced to sit across from them. She will be forced to pretend he doesn’t make her want to  _ destroy  _ everything. Herself, her family, but him. Him most of all.

Flesh under her fingernails. Soft skin and harsh bone against the unrelenting metal of the bathtub. A rapid and soon to be silent pulse beneath her hands. 

But she lets herself be dressed. Lets herself be taken to breakfast. 

Lets herself ignore the devouring eyes on her. 

She can feel them, greedy, tracking the length of her throat beneath her collar, the fingers around her fork. She’s so close to burying it into his throat.

She can feel her sister fidgeting next to her. Deathly silent. 

Her sister knows how those eyes feel, but she won’t say a thing. Neither will she. 

There’s a shame, there. But most of all, there’s a selfishness. This is her hardship to handle. This is her trauma to heal. And if that healing will be ugly and scarred, then she will cut herself open a million times to make him feel the same pain. 

She feels a foot against hers under the table. She moves away.

She can feel his anger building. He feels entitled to the blind girl, the cripple. She knows it’s coming. Every time he visits, it builds. It builds, and it builds, and it builds, until the force of his gaze is so heavy and so burning it’s hot iron, branding her with a terror and a shame so potent it suffocates.

Her throat closes up. She can’t force her food down. She’d probably just throw it up, anyway, and she won’t risk vomiting on him. He will hurt her for it. He will use any excuse to break her.

Distantly, she hears her sister and mother. They will be returning to town, they say. Looking for taffeta, instead of velvet.

Her sister will escape her uncle’s hand. 

She will try desperately to do the same, but how can a bird with a broken wing outrun a cat, whose appetite can only be soothed with flesh and blood and anguish?

He’s a sadist. And suddenly, she realizes he has made her the same.

When lunch is over, Louisa stays to clear the table. And suddenly, she knows he’s crossed the room. She can sense the heat at her back.

A finger brushes her shoulder, feather-light. She flinches, and she doesn’t have to have sight to know it makes him smile.

“You have grown,” he says. 

She swallows. 

“I have.”

His hand rests heavy on her shoulder. His voice is louder, in her ear. Breathless with excitement. “A pity.”

And she feels tears welling in her eyes. She feels the helplessness like a wave, pulling her under. “Let me go,” she whispers, voice cracking.

He laughs, and she feels it like a hand, vice-tight around her heart. “Not until I’m satisfied.”

“Miss?”

Her head turns so fast she nearly clips her Uncle’s nose. She wishes she could slam her forehead into it. Send it to the back of his skull and out, a gaping hole. A bullet wound, as empty as his chest, where no heart beats.

She can hear Louisa dithering at the door, and she knows something’s wrong. She is a colored woman, considered so less superior than the rest of them, even as one of them is blind, and yet, she is the best thing in the world. Louisa is colored, and she would give anything to see color, then, to know its beauty.

“It’s time for our walk in the garden,” Louisa says. They do not do these walks, but she would spend every day walking with Louisa if it would get her away from this man.

She can feel her uncle frown, feel how his posture straightens, an attempt at commanding. “I believe I need my niece for something. She can be spared from something so frivolous.”

Louisa’s voice hardens. She is beautiful in her bravery. “I’m afraid not, Mister. The Master has ordered she go outside once a day. It’s good for her to feel the shifts in light.”

Nonsense, but her Uncle has only one thing on his mind, and she will do anything to shift his focus.

She stands, even as her Uncle protests. 

“Slave, I don’t know  _ who you think you are _ –– ”

“I am her caretaker, sir –– “

_ SLAP! _

She feels her eyes widen at the sound, but even as guilt eats like acid in her chest, she doesn’t stick around. She’s feeling her way along the hallway, stumbling over loose bits of carpet. She feels the table, feels the vase, and her hand guides her along. She slams into the back door, and throws herself through it. 

She can’t see where she’s going, but she is running, running––

Her feet are on gravel. She can hear the crunch of it, and she’ll be lucky if she doesn’t get run over by a carriage, doesn’t trip and peel the skin right off of her face––

And she hears it. She strains, and she can hear the heavy pounding of footsteps. The clip of those boots, the kind that starred in her nightmares until she became her own worst enemy.

She runs faster, and she reaches out. She’s wheezing, fingers stretching, and she doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she finds it––

Her hand meets the rough leaves of the hedges around the grounds, and she runs along them, desperately praying she will make it––she feels the edges dip, and she ducks into the hedge maze.

She doesn’t have time to ponder; she races along, stumbling over stones, tripping on twigs, but she doesn’t stop, even as her lungs are burning, her chest is seizing with lack of air––

She follows the path, and she doesn’t hear his footsteps, anymore.

She slows to a jog, if only for a moment; and then she presses against the wall and stops.

Cocks her head, listening. 

She can’t hear footsteps. But she can hear the gardener humming.

And suddenly, she knows exactly where she’s going to hide. She never lets her hand leave the right side of the maze–– _ just like her storybooks, just like her heroines, always braver and smarter than herself _ ––and she finds the center. 

From there, she knows where to go.

She feels her way along: her hands are now her eyes, her feet are now her map. She knows that shed. Has walked the path to it a million times in her head.

She used to play in these gardens as a child. Her sister would always take her by the hand.

Her sister had been brave, then. Her sister would’ve stopped what was happening to them.

Her hand meets empty air, and she knows she’s exited by the shed. Sure enough, she can hear the gardener humming as he walks away. His back is probably to her, if he doesn’t acknowledge her presence.

Her father had strictly ordered the staff to keep watch of her; to ensure she didn’t go wandering off.

Too late now.

Her heartbeat is slowing, though still quick; she feels herself begin to breathe again. She feels for the rough wood of the door, the rusty lock––and she steps in. The air is mustier than the fresh-dew of the morning outside.

She steps in, and that’s when she hears it.

“Come out, come out…”

And ice floods her veins.

A hiccuping gasp leaves her lips, and she’s frozen. 

“Come on, darling niece… You’re fast, I hadn’t known––you never ran, before…” He seems to chuckle to himself. “Then again, I never did give you the chance…”

Something awakens in her. The same driving force that made her run. That takes her to a fantasy.

Not logic. Not intuition. This is  _ animal _ .

She throws herself to the ground, feels frantically until she reaches the corner, behind the last shelf. Back right corner. She pushes her back tight to the wall of the shed, head tucked down between her knees.

She stifles her heavy breaths with her hands.

She hears the crunch of grass, and then––a pause.

Too close for comfort. In the doorway, she thinks.

He steps forward, and she suppresses a sob, a cry in her chest. Two steps forward. Another stop.

“Neicie, where are you?”

She clenches her eyes shut, though it makes no difference. The only eyes she has are in her mind, and all she can think is how desperately she would kill this man, if only so that she would never have to feel this way again. This sheer terror, crawling in every synapse, every nerve, every vein.

Five more steps. Stop. Two. Stop.

She bites her hand. Doesn’t dare move.

He growls, aggravated. Not good. Not good for her.

And he leaves.

Her eyes go wide. She looks up, but it doesn’t do much. She doesn’t creep out, doesn’t dare, but she can’t hear him. She can’t, and she’ll wait a moment, maybe two, and then she can sneak back into the house, find her bedroom and have Louisa barricade the––

A breath in her ear. “Found you.”

And she’s ripped from her hiding spot. Ripped from the hope of not having to bear the burden of his attention.

She stares up. Doesn't move, lifeless as he takes what he wants. She has never been brave in the daylight.

She focuses on the oil can, so she doesn’t have to think, have to feel anything else. So she doesn’t have to face her reality. It drips steadily. 

The doors would be quiet, then.

*

The hall is dark, and there’s something dripping. 

Maybe it’s the leaky taps, she thinks. Maybe it's the oil can. Maybe it’s the steady flow of blood down her fingers, slipping to the floor with a soft sound that seems to echo around the house.

How had it come to this?

Was it blindness? Was it her helplessness? 

Was it weakness, that drew this man’s attention?

There was a time she might’ve blamed some god out there, some other divine power for the faults in her life. But now…

Now, she is more aware than ever that there is no god. How can there be, when, at this moment, this is the closest she’ll ever be to an angel? Fallen, maybe, but still holy. Still a harbinger of death, leaving destruction in her wake.

This is her blind faith.

She sets the letter opener on the bedside table as she slips off her socks, now soaked through. 

She’s exhausted. 

The bed is soft, a little lumpy in some places, but she knows the dips and valleys of the mattress like a long lost friend. She’s missed the feeling of it under her. It’s a little damp in some areas, but she doesn’t care. The blanket is threadbare, the same well-worn quilt from when she was a child, but it feels wonderful. It feels like home.

The body next to her is cold, but it doesn’t matter. His eyes are gone, his tongue ripped from its cavern. His pelvis is where the blood is pooled the most, though. His throat is exposed, his esophagus bare for the world. The strings are cut. 

No one heard him scream. The others didn’t hear each other, either. Just as no one heard her.

The house is quiet. Completely quiet.

For the first time, she has silence. For the first time, she isn’t itching. There is blood under her fingernails, but it fills a hole inside of her that was carved long ago.

As she falls asleep, she remembers her storybook, and she thinks maybe some dreams do come true.

She just wishes she could’ve seen it all in the moonlight.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Spooktacular, a Halloween-themed assignment for my English class! Hope everyone had a happy Halloween!


End file.
